It’s been several decades since the advent of B2B Integration platforms. Organizations are looking to modernize their B2B platforms and processes to stay current with modern user experience paradigms and speed of business. Some of the top challenges faced by organizations today are around partner onboarding, different data types and ever-changing integration needs.
There are 3 key areas of enhancements for B2B platforms:
Self-service
Traditionally the process of setting up a partner for a B2B integration involved the exchange of setup information using static forms (e.g. Excel templates) with manual verification. Furthermore, the testing of the data exchange process was also manual and often required multiple iterations. Some organizations have used custom development to build libraries and scripts to help automate the process. Nevertheless, this is a time-consuming and manual intensive process that can often take several weeks to onboard a partner.
Real-time exchange
A majority of data exchange between business today is in the form of a batch process involving the transfer of large files and subsequent validation of the files. If there are errors or the transfer is not complete, then the sender needs to retry and/or resend the files after addressing the errors. This process is cumbersome and gets in the way of a real-time data exchange model that can be used for efficient automation.
API interfaces
Most of the data uses protocols and structures that are designed for batch processes and/or legacy systems. The EDI document structure has wide adoption in various domains such has healthcare, finance, supply chain, etc. Other structures and formats such as cXML are also used in the ecommerce space. Since all these documents and structures were designed purely from a data perspective, they require additional processing to be converted to modern formats such as JSON that are more amenable and supported by other systems, e.g. omni-channel and mobile applications.
Modern solutions for a partner hub
Integration platforms are not just limited to building and managing the APIs across systems. A robust solution for supporting data exchange with partners will require the following components:
- Support for leading integration platforms
- API-first operational data store to natively expose data as APIs
- Robust track-and-trace functionality to monitor performance and payload status
- Partner portals that are UI and API-centric to support extensibility
- Accelerators and low-code tools for rapid and consistent development and deployment
Persistent’s solution for Partner hub as a Service
Some of the winning features of such a solution – self-service nature, easy integration, and extreme user-friendliness – draw out similarities with our Partner Data Hub.
Our Data and Integrations team is comprised of seasoned veterans with a successful track record of several implementations of EDI and Partner data exchanges. We combine our expertise and experience with the leading integration platforms of the day along with our business knowledge to bring to you a robust packaged solution to implement a Partner Data Hub as a managed service.
Our offering consists of:
- Self-service for partner onboarding
- Low-code platform for operationalizing your data using APIs
- Accelerators for track-and-trace and DevOps
In addition to provide the basic requirements for security at rest and in transit, our solution provides additional capabilities such as
- One-click API generation
- Support for complex data structures
- Custom data formats
- Swagger API documentation
- Audit trails
- Non-repudiation
- Containerized architecture for web-scale
- Data versioning
- Role based access control
- IP whitelisting
- Maker/checker workflows to author/update data
- Support for multiple data stores (databases) and cloud platforms
- Operational dashboards
The data world is fast evolving and data integration solutions need to keep pace with it. The key to differentiation lies in business agility and user productivity. Our Partner Hub platform equips you with features so you can onboard, organize, and exchange data and truly innovate.
